Chapter 12
Adrian almost paid the standstill fee himself.
He could afford it, and the idea of buying seven days of safety felt comfortingly simple. He had spent much of his adult life making unpleasant problems retreat behind a wire transfer.
Leila stopped him. “If you pay personally, you'll blur the boundaries between your interests and the foundation's. Worse, the contract may still be challenged. We need board authority and clear terms.”
“Seven days could make a difference.”
“So could paying money to an entity we suspect is benefiting from misconduct.”
Naomi sat on the opposite side of the table, listening. She had asked Adrian not to offer to cover her rent either. The gesture might have been kind, but she wanted the employment record corrected and the withheld wages addressed, not private gifts that made the case easier for everyone but her.
The accounting firm produced a preliminary report. The allegedly stolen forty-eight thousand dollars had entered a foundation reserve account, then been moved through a series of intercompany entries. One later payment matched part of a Mariner invoice. The accounting treatment was poor; the records did not support the accusation that Naomi had received the money.
The accountants also noticed that the foundation had never made a formal police complaint against Naomi. The alleged theft had existed in a personnel file and a board packet, where it was damaging enough to follow her professionally but never tested by an outside investigator.
“Why not report it?” Naomi asked.
“Perhaps they knew the records wouldn't survive scrutiny,” Adrian suggested.
“Or they were trying to avoid attention to the accounts,” Dana said. “We don't know which. But this can be documented without speculation.”
Naomi requested copies of the complete employment file. Her lawyer began preparing a correction demand addressed not only to the foundation but also to the third-party firm that had retained the original dismissal notation. It felt administrative compared with the dramatic courtroom confrontation Adrian imagined. To Naomi, it was more immediate: that notation had cost her work.
The process would be tedious. There would be forms, delays, people asking her to prove the same thing repeatedly. This time she would have counsel and the original bank trail.
Adrian asked why Stephen would have labeled it theft.
Dana answered, “That's a question for Stephen. We can document the change. We can't read his mind.”
They requested an interview. Stephen responded through counsel, saying he was willing to cooperate after arrangements were made to preserve his legal rights. He also sent a list of files he wanted the foundation to secure before anyone altered them.
Stephen's lawyer had included the precise archive names rather than a vague plea for secrecy. Dana said that specificity was useful. It would let independent custodians preserve files without giving Stephen or Vivian an opportunity to choose which messages survived.
One item startled Adrian: delegated approvals from Adrian's executive email account, including the message sent to Naomi six years earlier.
“I never gave Stephen access to my personal messages,” Adrian said.
“You gave him access to the executive mailbox,” Leila reminded him. “The delegation forms are in the archive.”
Adrian read his own authorization. Stephen and Vivian's office had been permitted to prepare responses to routine foundation matters during a period when Adrian was frequently traveling. The arrangement had begun long before his accident and continued afterward.
“That email to Naomi might not have been typed by me,” he said.
“Maybe. But someone used authority you handed over,” Leila answered. “And you never corrected the result.”
Naomi leaned back, eyes fixed on the window. “I kept thinking if I used the right words, you'd recognize I was telling the truth.”
Adrian felt a terrible urge to explain how busy he had been, how many responsibilities he carried, how easy it was to trust staff. None of it changed the years she'd lost.
“I should have asked to see you,” he said.
She turned toward him. “Yes.”
That single word was harder to endure than a speech.
In the afternoon, Arthur requested a private dinner. Adrian declined and offered a meeting with counsel present. Arthur refused.
Then Margaret called with news from the bank: the accounting firm had identified a previously unlisted loan connected to Morrow's development proposal. The guarantor was not shown on the abbreviated disclosure.
They would need the full financing documents to know who stood to gain.
Adrian looked across the room at the open golden locket on Naomi's desk, its tiny photograph of Evelyn catching the late sunlight.
May you like
Once, he had believed the family name was a wall that kept danger outside.
He was beginning to understand who had been trapped behind it.
